Electronic books (e-books) are increasing in popularity, and many different e-book formats exist: EPUB, Mobipocket, PDF, HTML, and .azw, for example. In order to address a wide range of distributors in different countries, a publisher should have e-book versions for each format. Generally speaking, the electronic version of a book should be true to the non-electronic version in content and layout. For example, page settings and text structure elements such as paragraphs, headers, image layouts, and chapter breaks in the electronic version should be the same as they are in the non-electronic version.
Most of the time, the electronic version that publishers have has a fixed layout (e.g., Portable Document Format (PDF) files). However, most of the e-book formats are Extensible Markup Language (XML)-based and are meant to stream a text in an adaptative layout.
Conventional solutions for converting from a fixed layout are burdensome and not entirely user-friendly. For example, a book may be converted from a PDF file into a draft HyperText Markup Language (HTML) file, which is then edited manually to correct aspects of the HTML draft such as pagination and formatting. This type of editing can be difficult, and also requires the editor to be trained to work with such a file.
As a consequence, converting an e-book from a fixed layout (e.g., PDF) file to an adaptive layout is problematic. No tool able to professionally convert a fixed layout file to other e-book formats is currently available; the appearance of the book can be preserved only at the cost of the loss of e-book functionalities (e.g., the capability to change the text size while keeping the same page size, the capability to change the text font, etc.).
Therefore, a tool that facilitates the proper conversion of books to electronic books would be valuable.